viewpoint: ben cohen

Abbas’s desperate Balfour gesture

Posted

It’s been a long time since I saw a gesture this desperate. At the recent Arab Summit in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki announced that his boss, PA President Mahmoud Abbas, had asked the Arab states prepare a legal case against Britain in retaliation for the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The Balfour Declaration, which took the form of a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to the Zionist leader Lord Rothschild, confirmed Britain’s favorable view of a “national homeland” for the Jewish people in Palestine, which came under British control towards the end of World War I.

For that reason, the PLO’s National Covenant dates the beginning of the “Zionist invasion” to 1917—any Jews who arrived in the land after that date are considered to be illegal settlers. These days, that’s basically every Jew in Israel.

Of course, Abbas has been able to get away with this kind of incitement many times in the past, so there was no reason for him to expect any moral condemnation from Western leaders. Had he stuck to denying the link between Jews and the city of Jerusalem, or named another public square after a terrorist, he would probably have been spared the ridicule which has greeted his tactical error of going after the British—and therefore going too far. 

Similarly grandiose gestures by Abbas in the past — for example his failed campaign for international recognition of a Palestinian state outside of negotiations — have also gone south, so it should be no surprise if his threat to sue the Brits comes to naught. Within a couple of days of Maliki’s Nouakchott announcement, British diplomats were reporting their Palestinian counterparts telling them that there was no substance behind it. 

Page 1 / 4